Off across the lawns and woodlands stretched the blue, sail-flecked
waters of the Sound, and on the next hill rose the tile roofs and cream
-white walls of the country club.
One evening, Adrienne left the dancers for the pergola, where she took
refuge under a mass of honeysuckle.
Samson South followed her. She saw him coming, and smiled. She was
contrasting this Samson, loosely clad in flannels, with the Samson she
had first seen rising awkwardly to greet her in the studio.
"You should have stayed inside and made yourself agreeable to the
girls," Adrienne reproved him, as he came up. "What's the use of making
a lion of you, if you won't roar for the visitors?"
"I've been roaring," laughed the man. "I've just been explaining to
Miss Willoughby that we only eat the people we kill in Kentucky on
certain days of solemn observance and sacrifice. I wanted to be
agreeable to you, Drennie, for a while."
The girl shook her head sternly, but she smiled and made a place for
him at her side. She wondered what form his being agreeable to her
would take.
"I wonder if the man or woman lives," mused Samson, "to whom the
fragrance of honeysuckle doesn't bring back some old memory that is as
strong--and sweet--as itself."
The girl did not at once answer him. The breeze was stirring the hair
on her temples and neck. The moon was weaving a lace pattern on the
ground, and filtering its silver light through the vines. At last, she
asked: "Do you ever find yourself homesick, Samson, these days?"
The man answered with a short laugh. Then, his words came softly, and
not his own words, but those of one more eloquent: "'Who hath desired the Sea? Her excellent loneliness rather
"'Than the forecourts of kings, and her uttermost pits
than the streets where men gather....
"'His Sea that his being fulfills?
"'So and no otherwise--"so and no otherwise hillmen
desire their hills.'"
"And yet," she said, and a trace of the argumentative stole into her
voice, "you haven't gone back."
"No." There was a note of self-reproach in his voice. "But soon I
shall go. At least, for a time. I've been thinking a great deal lately
about 'my fluttered folk and wild.' I'm just beginning to understand my
relation to them, and my duty."
"Your duty is no more to go back there and throw away your life," she
found herself instantly contending, "than it is the duty of the young
eagle, who has learned to fly, to go back to the nest where he was
hatched."